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In this paper I wish to explore the problem of stealing as a disturbance related to difficulties in coming to a recognition and acknowledgement of the need for an object with all this implies. To illustrate I should like to report sessions from three adolescent boys, beginning with John, a 19 year old boy whom I had been seeing once-weekly for psychotherapy. He was in his first year at College and came to treatment for, inter alia, examination difficulties. He was of high intelligence, and was not succeeding as he should.
John began his tenth session with an apology for his absence the previous week, explaining that he had had a terrific temperature—“really astronomical!” He proceeded to question why he had this difficulty writing exams—why he “blacks out”. He explained that when he had been rereading his examination papers he found how superb, what masterpieces the papers could have been, indeed, Ph.D. standard, had he only been able to follow his ideas through. He felt it was the same with his tennis, how fantastically well he could play—sometimes. Then he said, in a denigrating tone, that his college was, anyway, “only a crummy place for crummy people,” so that it in fact just meant being “a big crumb among all the little crumbs” adding “You can't trust anything really.”
I commented on his account of these fantastic performances, showing him that when he did well he felt his achievements to be so astronomical as to “black out” his objects. I referred, too, to previous material about his feelings of having blacked-out (denigrated) his father, and suggested that he doubted my strength to stand up to these attacks.
He at once denied any such suspicion about me, and launched into an account of how fantastically he had improved since he had been coming to me, adding “Of course, I still require more.”
When I suggested that he was denying his anxiety that with this fantastic improvement he would reduce me to being just a crumb, and that although he appeared to be giving me